Project Description

CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. This report includes an update on the project team's activities for 2009. The next update will be released Friday, February 5th.

Updates are emailed to the Announcements list and posted to the project wiki and website the first Friday of every month.

2009

The project team would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all our friends, colleagues, collaborators, and advisers. You have all helped contribute to an incredibly successful year for CollectionSpace.

2009: Releases

In the latter half of 2009, the CollectionSpace project team released versions 0.1 - 0.3 of the software (with 0.4 due in mid-January). Highlights of the releases include:

• Support for three of the eight core procedures recommended by CollectionsTrust via the Spectrum museum documentation standard: intake, acquisition, and cataloging
• First versions of search and search results viewing
• Support for controlled lists and non-hierarchical vocabularies, accessible via dropdown and a predictive-text search interface
• Authorization
• Support for special fields such as dimensions and calendar dates

2009: Community

In addition to founding partners Museum of the Moving Image, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, and University of Toronto, the project added two new contributing institutions: the Walker Art Center and the Statens Museum for Kunst.

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) is using CollectionSpace to create an online catalog with an emphasis on primary source materials assembled and generated during the acquisition process.

Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen), the National Gallery of Denmark, is using CollectionSpace as their enterprise-wide collections information, management, and access resource.  It will also support their Virtual SMK initiative.

The project team also expanded its community of contributors via conferences, meetings with individual museums, a successful webinar series, and more. Check the wiki Events page for upcoming opportunities to meet the team.

2010: Looking Ahead

The project team is looking forward to the 1.0 release in June, 2010. The release will include support for the eight core procedures recommended by Spectrum (Intake, Acquisition, Cataloging, Location and Movement Control, Loans In, Loans Out, Object Exit, and Retrospective Documentation), and support functionality such as reporting and media handling.

2010: Get Involved

CollectionSpace is a community-driven, collaborative development environment. That means we rely on the skills and talent of developers and collections experts like you. There are many ways to get involved with CollectionSpace, including:

• Contributing development resources
• Providing services and support to CollectionSpace users
• Serving as a subject matter expert for requirements building
• Evaluating the usability and accessibility of the software
• Installing and testing the software at your home institution

If you would like to contribute, we would be delighted for you to join us.  Please contact us with your ideas at collectionspace@movingimage.us or join us on one of our many communication and collaboration platforms to see what we're up to, including our mailing lists, IRC Channel, and wiki.